Jazz Tactics

JAZZ TACTICSS Express Yourself The goal of all art is self-expression. Whether you are painting, dancing or playing music, you must express something from within. What matters to the listener is not which notes you play, but how you play them. Don’t get so hung up thinking about what you know (or don’t know) that you ignore how you feel .

Sound & Rhythm Your sound is the most unique aspect of your musical personality. If you play a note with a beautiful sound the battle is half won. Listen to players with great sounds, and always start with a concept of how you want to sound. Rhythm is the aspect of music that we respond to on the most basic level. Whenever you play, strive to create a groove-the soloist is as responsible for the time as the drummer or bass player. Practice with a metronome on beats 2 and 4 to improve your time feel and sense of swing.

Jazz Is A Language Learning to improvise is like learning a language. As babies we learn to speak by listening and trying to repeat what we hear. Through imitation and repetition we develop a vocabulary and an understanding of how to combine words to express ideas. The greater your vocabulary, the more precisely and colorfully you can express yourself, HOWEVER, memorizing the dictionary does not make you a great author any more than memorizing licks and patterns makes you a great improviser. You must have a story to tell! Wynton Marsalis says: “If you want to play music, you must listen to the music that has already been played.” To develop your musical concept, study great jazz players, past and present. By discovering what others have done, you will formulate a clearer picture of what you want to do. Clark Terry says: “Imitation, Assimilation, Innovation”. Learn tunes and solos by ear (transcribe), and copy the soloist as closely as possible in order to extract maximum information. Absorb from many sources-your style will emerge as a product of your influences.

A Conversation, Not A Monologue In most cases, a jazz musician is not a solo artist-she is playing with other musicians. Even when one player is soloing, everybody is improvising and they are all improvising together. Listen and respond to the other players-together you can create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Attend live concerts, so you can see as well as hear the interaction between the musicians.

Scales & Chords & Melody Since a jazz improviser is a composer as well as an interpreter and performer, he must understand the relationship of melody and harmony. While jazz musicians typically have a strong understanding of harmony, melody is the most important aspect of an improvised solo. Memorize melodies that have stood the test of time (standard tunes). Even nursery rhymes can teach you a lot about melody! The more tunes you learn, the better you will understand what makes a good melody. When improvising a solo, the melody of the tune should always be firmly in your head. Chords provide the roadmap for an improvised solo. Each chord is derived from the notes of a scale, usually 1,3,5, & 7 (the chord tones). Think of a scale as a pool of notes to choose from when creating a melody, with the chord tones as the most prominent target notes. Start simply-augment the written melody with one or two other notes from the chord, especially 3rds & 7 ths. When playing through a chord progression, discover which chord tones are common to adjacent chords, and which move to a nearby note (guide tones). The jazz musician must think in two planes, horizontally and vertically, to compose a melody that wends its way through the chord changes.

More Is Less Hal Galper says: “Learn to hear everything, and play everything you hear. Then, hear everything and play as little of it as possible.” A chef doesn’t throw every ingredient into the pot; a painter doesn’t use every color in her palette. Likewise, you should resist the temptation to play too much. Think of your notes as a painting, and the space around them as the frame. Don’t hang the pictures too closely together on the wall-leave some room between your phrases. Stop playing and listen for a few seconds; you may be surprised to find out how good the band sounds without you! Play less, listen more-you will never go wrong by listening!

Have fun! Jazz students often become inhibited as they start to learn what notes they ‘should’ and ‘should not’ play. This is not the point! Learn as much as you can about the music, but when the time comes, play from the heart, not the mind. Take chances-if your solo is delivered with conviction and emotion, there are no wrong notes. A ‘mistake’ can be turned into brilliance if you keep your ears open and live in the moment. Above all, have fun! Jazz is fun-it represents freedom: freedom to play what you hear, freedom to play what you feel. If the musicians are feeling good, the audience will too.

JAZZ IMPROVISATION: THE FOUR ‘T’S (2) The jazz musician needs two basic abilities in order to improvise a solo: • •

She must be able to play what she hears. She must be able to hear something worth playing.

The following ‘4-T’ approach to practicing jazz will develop both your ability to play what you hear, and to hear something worth playing, Each day you should: • • • •

Learn music by ear (Transcribe) Memorize Tunes Transpose: develop your key fluency Study musical Theory and harmony

LEARN BY EAR (T RANSCRIBE) Music should be learned by ear. Explaining to a student that a C7(b9) chord calls for a diminished scale is virtually useless until she not only recognizes the sound of that chord and scale, but has heard it used in context. Every day you should learn something by ear, simply trying to reproduce on your instrument what you hear. Even though the majority jazz musicians today have had the benefit of jazz education, most will tell you that they really learned to improvise by listening and copying, rather than by reading jazz improv texts or practicing scales and patterns. Start with nursery rhymes or Happy Birthday, a melody that is already deeply ingrained in your mind. Pick a starting note, and sing the melody, then try to figure out the notes on your instrument. It doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make, as long as you eventually get it. Once you figure it out, pick another starting note and try it in another key, remembering to sing it first. (Brass players can buzz it on the mouthpiece.) Eventually you’ll get over your fear of playing without music in front of you. Next, try transcribing a simple jazz solo. Solo transcription is the most important part of learning to improvise. If you do nothing else but transcribe solos, you will learn to improvise. If you do everything else but do not transcribe, there is NO guarantee you will ever sound like anything other than a robot, spitting out scales and patterns but not making any real music. Which solos should you transcribe? That is up to you. You will develop your own musical vocabulary based on the players you listen to. It behooves everybody, however, to spend some time studying players who speak the straight-ahead vocabulary of jazz, clearly delineating the chord changes. If you love late-60’s Miles, you must realize that he didn’t learn to play the way he did on ‘Bitches Brew’ without first knowing how to play on ‘Stella By Starlight’, and neither will you. Learn the basics of the language before veering off towards the outer fringes. Besides, there will be a lot more gigs playing ‘All The Things You Are’ than ‘Ascension’. Initially, choose solos that are simple to hear and to play; it is important to be successful in your first attempts at transcription, not get bogged down trying to figure out a slew of 16 th notes in the first bar. If you come to a section that is too difficult to hear, skip it and move on. A year from now you may find that you can hear it without difficulty. Chet Baker is my choice for initial attempts at transcription, since his solos are always melodic and lyrical. Some of Miles’ solos on ‘Kind of Blue’ are also good to start with. Whether to write the solos down is a subject of some discussion. It is most important to get the solo into your head and then out your horn, but trying to notate what you hear is good for you. Also, you’ll have some record for posterity of all your hard work. Learn chunks of the solo (or the whole solo) by memory first, then write it down, rather than jotting down one note at a time. This forces you to learn phrases and improves your powers of memorization. Don’t fret about whether the solos are perfectly notated-the written transcription serves primarily to remind you of what you already have in your head. Once you have transcribed the solo, play along with the recording many times, trying to match the soloist as closely as possible. In this way, you’ll get the feeling of playing a great solo, and will gain insight into the mind of a jazz soloist. Try ‘trading fours’ with the artist. Just think how much you’d learn by trading fours with Charlie Parker or Clifford Brown! You’ll have to ignore the fact that they play right through your fours. By copying your musical heroes, you will learn from each one. Little by little, your style will emerge as a product of your influences. As Clark Terry so aptly said: Imitate, Assimilate, Innovate.

JAZZ IMPROVISATION: THE FOUR ‘T’S (2) M EMORIZE T UNES It is important to memorize tunes for two reasons. One, every jazz player needs to have a repertoire of tunes that she can play without resorting to a fake book. This shared repertoire allows a group of jazz players to get on the stand, call a tune, and start to play. This amazes people who do not understand jazz, that we can ‘spontaneously’ play music. It is because we have a common understanding of the framework of a tune, and how to create within that framework. Two, the primary goal of a jazz improviser is to compose new melodies. To learn what makes a good melody, study songs that have stood the test of time (standards). When you learn a tune, learn the correct melody, preferably from several sources. Always try to have both a recording and a lead sheet for a tune that you are learning, comparing the way the melody was originally written with at least one player’s interpretation of it. It is best to learn tunes from vocalists, since their use of words promotes good phrasing. Besides, a melody is quicker to learn with words than without, and it will be easier to recall the melody if you can think of the words. You will always play a tune better if you know the words.

DEVELOP KEY F LUENCY (T RANSPOSE) A jazz player must be comfortable in all keys, since any chord might occur at any time. For most players there are roughly 7 or 8 ‘easy’ key signatures, and 4 or 5 ‘hard’ keys. They are not really harder, just less familiar. To improve your key fluency, take a short phrase, lick or pattern through 12 keys every day. This may seem onerous at first, but you will get better at it quickly. Think of the melody as chord tones, this translates quickly into all keys. When you learn a tune, play the melody up and down a half-step from the original key. This ensures that you really know the tune, and forces you to deal with some of the less-familiar key signatures.

STUDY T HEORY AND HARMONY This is where aspiring jazz players often start out-learning about scales and chords. Frequently, it is where they give up, as the whole process seems just too complicated and academic. While it is crucial that a jazz musician understands music theory, it should be taught in a practical context, always associating a sound with the theory. Being told that the notes of a Cm9 chord are C-Eb-G-Bb-D is just rote memorization. Playing those notes on the horn while the piano plays the chord provides immediate gratification and an understanding of the sound, rather than the theory that explains the sound. For starters, concentrate on the following three scales and chords. They will get you through most standard tunes, and will help you play through the ubiquitous II-V-I progression. • • •

Major scale / Major Seven Chords Mixolydian scale / Dominant Seven chords (lower the 7 th note in both scale and chord) Dorian scale / Minor Seven chords (lower the 7 th and 3rd notes in both scale and chord)

MAKING THE CHANGES • Learn the correct melody, with lyrics. There is a note for every syllable. It is quicker and more effective to learn a melody with words. Learn the melody in more than one key. • Set your ‘musical GPS’ by listening/playing/singing the melody until you can’t not hear it when the chords are played. The melody notes are your waystations. There should be a ‘gravitational pull’ toward the melody notes as you improvise. • Improvise by playing just the melody. Change it rhythmically, always singing the lyrics in your head as you do. There are an infinite number of ways a line can be phrased. Try removing some of the melody notes, playing only the ones that are left. It’s amazing how good this can sound. • Embellish the melody with diatonic tones. Connect the melody notes, or step away from the melody and back, within the key of the tune. You are starting to add notes of your own, but sticking close to the waystations. • Embellish the melody with chromatic tones. By incorporating chromatic connecting and approach tones, every note is available on every chord. This adds harmonic complexity, and tension/resolution to your lines. You can come up with very interesting lines simply by playing a half step above or below a target note, then moving to it. As long as you gravitate back to a melody note, resolution is guaranteed. • Start to move away from the melody and compose new melodies of your own. At regular intervals, go back to the original melody. Play one melody segment, then one segment of your own. Don’t lose sight of the waystations! • Identify the pivotal tones and incorporate them into your lines. They will reveal the harmonic twists and turns. • Exercise: To expand your hearing, listen for a single note in the piano voicing. Quickly play that note, and then listen for another one. Listen more than you play. This opens your ears and unlocks the harmony one note at a time. When improvising, grab a note from the piano voicing to start each phrase. Don’t play until you hear a note. • At home: Play ‘iPod roulette’. Put on an unknown playalong track. If you recognize the tune, try to play the exact melody. If you don’t recognize the tune, try to figure out the harmonic structure. Listen for bass notes and piano voicing notes. Again, listen more than you play. Once you have figured out as much as you can by ear, open the book. Learn the melody and study the chords. Discover what you couldn’t hear. Play all the roots, all the thirds, all the sevenths etc. Create guidetone lines. Get inside the harmonic structure, always relating it to the melody. • Remember the Four T’s: • TUNES: learn a tune a week, inside and out. • TRANSPOSITION: transpose each tune up and down a half step. • TRANSCRIPTION: transcribe solos by ear. Learn music aurally. • THEORY: expand your understanding of the building blocks of music. • LISTEN! Play what you hear, not what you know. Music comes from the heart, not the brain.

LISTEN!